How Office 365 can help you comply with GDPR

Check out our latest blog post to help you in your GDPR compliance journey.

The May 25th is over and all the buzz about getting ready for the GDPR has now gone. The new era of the Data Protection Regulation just started in Europe and the question now is does your business GPDR compliant right now?

With all the efforts that companies have done since last year to comply with the GDPR, we will now see how the new regulation will affect us, the impact in daily business and the real consequences that non compliant companies might face.

One of the effects that we saw ont he first day of GDPR, besides the funny tweets and memes that flooded the internet, was some US-based sites such as LA Times and Chicago Tribune blocking access from European users because they weren’t GDPR compliant yet. Last Friday the users were faced with an apologetic message saying that they were working to allow Europeans to access the website as they were used to access.

While we all wait for news of any comapnies who have failed to comply with GDPR and enfoecment might look like, the recommendation is to prepare your business as much as possible to avoid fines and penalties. Microsoft is one of the IT vendors more engaged in offer GDPR solutions to their customers, through an easy and painless experience. One of the Microsoft products which can help you on being compliant is Office 365.

How exactly can Microsoft Office 365 help?

Office 365 is full of tools and resources to help you organize and automate your data. Check it out below the main ones which can help you with the GDPR.

Step 1: Discover

Advanced Data Governance

The Office 365 suite provides you intelligence and machine-assisted insights to help you find, classify, set policies on, and take steps to manage the data most important to your organisation. The machine learning technologies power precise search apabilities to help your company to find text and metadata in content across your Office 365 assets and quickly identify important and relevant documents.

Step 2: Manage

Data Loss Prevention

With Office 365 you can identify over 80 common sensitive data types (including financial, medical, and personally identifiable information), or configure actions to protect sensitive information and prevent its accidental disclosure.

Step 3: Protect

Advanced Threat Protection

Office 365 allows you to protect your email against new, sophisticated malware attacks in real time and enables your company to create policies to protect users against malicious email threats.

Advanced Security Management

Helps you identify high-risk and abnormal usage, alerts you to potential breaches, and allows you to create policies to track high-risk actions.

Step 4: Report

Customer Lockbox

Office 365 Audit Logs

Enable you to monitor and track user and administrator activities across workloads in Office 365, which help with early detection and investigation of security and compliance issues.

All these features can help your company in the process of complying with the new GDPR regulations. Managing and protecting data will be extremely important points to consider. Once, well managed they can help your organisation avoid those hefty GDPR fines. New Horizons Ireland GDPR specialist, David Farrelly, strongly recommends that companies at least start to think about all the data that they collect now. So, they will have a couple of months ahead to decide the process and implement the changes.

Office 365 and GPDR are both courses that New Horizons Ireland provide, in case you decide to upskill your team. On one hand Office 365 can help you with the management and control data. On the other hand, specific knowledge about the GDPR and their impacts can help your team to map and plan the best practices that the company should put in practise.

*This piece of content does not provide you with any legal rights to any intellectual property in any of Microsoft or New Horizons products. You may copy and use this document for your internal, reference purposes.